If Hover Vessels would leave a trail on the terrain, then roads would start appearing between the points of interest. It would look more realistic, well, in reality, transport routes were and remain an important part of the development of civilization.
Right! (24th Century) Not to mention that such additional Textures like Tracks would decrease the overall Performance of EGS even further.
No need for additional textures : if the HV is close enough to the ground and there is grass, it could simply use the mining/ flatten ground function just behind to remove the grass in its path. Less grass = better performance. Apart from that, regarding the OP, I hope they will fix the stamps splatmaps because we can use these to make roads : And roads are soooo much fun to zip around in a HV (or the motorbike) without hitting the ground / bumps/ flipping all over the place... Also, even if the game is set in the future, not all planets/ societies are at the same stage of development. Some planets can be in middle age, some in prehistoric stage, some far in the future, etc. The galaxy can not be realistically populated by identical societies with same level of development. As such, roads and bridges can be expected on some planets, some could even have castles and pyramids, still showing signs of a distant past. Here on Earth, it's quite possible that our great pyramids will still be around for many centuries in the future.
My guess is that since players are not really focused on making nice roads, driving slowly and carefully following terrain, these would not look like roads but more like missing grass patches all over the place... ^^ But mining tools are already allowed on HV so it's just a matter of having a ghost tool at the back of any HV pointing at the ground, with a low range. If the player moves up just a tiny bit then the tool doesn't reach the ground and no trail appears. When I mine surface rocks I always let go of the trigger a micro second too late, and it removes the grass pretty quickly but does not affect ground shape. Same idea for a HV "trail maker" to avoid digging when stationary : have it remove only top deco (grass) and nothing else.
Yep, that could go either way. On the one hand less grass 'should' be better for performance. On the other hand it is more terrain modifications to keep track of, which is worse for performance and loading/rendering. Who knows, inside Unity just keeping track of the removed grass itself without texture/terrain changes may take up more performance than the grass did in the first place.
